Where should i start, oh yea, how about here.
Sit back, get confortable and prepare your self for a VERY long read.

Starting off...
Name: Stevan Veselinovic
Age: 14 (just about 15)
Sex: umm, Male
Location: Santa Clause Island USA, (what makes you think i will tell you where i live?)
Born in: Serbo Croatia (close by Yugoslavia, or it used to be)
Other: English is NOT my first language, though it seems as if it is, does it not?

Continuing on..
I have had a really hard time in 1998, when i was 11, i believe it was, I had to have heart surgery due to a artiry problem, there wasnt enough blood flowing through it and if i did not have that fixed i would of had died at the age of 12. But, god was there
with me the whole time, even though i can not reMember the surgery that well.

A priest from a local church that we went 2 came into the hosital room with his 2 daughters, he prayed for me before surgery and after surgery, i wanted to thank him for praying for me at the time of need, but he denied by saying that i was not supposed to
say Thank You to Priests. I do not know why.. But anyhow, a week after that i came home, i reMember having to get used to sleeping on my back for 24 hours, when i laughed my heart would hurt, when i walked my heart would feel like it was shaking, when i got
off of the bed and raised my head, it would hurt, but God came through for me and answered the Priests prayors.

lol, i reMember, the first time i got out of bed, my friends came over with their parents, they brought a bag of bananas and gave them to me, i was so happy to see my friends because they have brought me a sword as well ( a toy sword) to play with...

Then, it was christmas time, somewhere before new years, i got out of bed and i reMember me standing by the couch putting on my shooes getting ready to go to a friends house, haha, my brother who is now 16 made a joke about me kissing our friends older daughter,
she was 13 i think, ( i sort of had a crush on her hehe)..

When we got there i got to sort of make 'fun' of him as well, he liked her 2, he always said that our friends younger daughter liked me, she would not leave me alone..

Her and I, we used to spy on my brother and her sister talking, and kissing as well, hahaha...

Those were the days,

When i was 5.
I had to squeze water out of a blanket that was kept under a trackter, and we were on top if it, i reMember hearing gun shots and bombs falling always wondering if eather my Dad or my Uncle were hit, they were not, Jesus was there with them the whole time,
he helped them recognize us as well as he helped us recognize him..

I reMember seeing an army man run down our yard saying 'get out of the house, they are bombing get out, get out' i was 5, i ran out of the house with my disk collection in my hand, my Brother and I threw them like freezbies, into the bushes, saying 'were not
afraid of you' (we were)....

My brother, he wanted to take the TV and the Radio with us to keep up to date with the news, my mom said no because she believed that we would come back, *sniff* i left my little cat there, as well as the rest of the stock we had (cows, pigs, sheep, horses)....
My mom was baking bread at the time the army man came running down the yard.

My grandma wanted to stay and watch them, but i told her if she stay's i stay, we both die together, she listened and came with us, on the tracktor, we had no transportation so our friends picked us up, we hid under a blanket, some had to hide under other people.

A few miles forward we came upon a 'road block' security officers were there looking for anyone who was trying to excape, and who had weapons, they took the driver in while we were guarded by 2 guards, the driver came back out and drove away with us in the
back, i still wonder what he did inside that building, i think Jesus worked a miracle to get us out of there..

Then we again came upon a school building, it has been so long since i have seen a book and pencil, that i actually liked school for the time being. We stayed there fora few days, then went under the tracktor like i explaing earlier, my uncle after we saw each
other, him and his friends drove a whole truck of bread and food, first time we ate 2...

Then he went to get water, he came back saying that he saw our dad, my mom went with him and they came back, the 3 of them, uncle, mom, and dad..

Dad had changed so much in the war, i barelly recognized him, he barelly recognized us... i dont quite reMember on how we got to actually recognize him, Jesus heped for shure.. Jesus, helped us recognize out family in the time of need, he helped us find my
brothers uncle and our dad ...
Well, now that all of that is over im feeling better then ever, i hold up 3 blogs, 2 websites ( for a friend ) and i know Visual Basic 6 very well now, C++ is what i'am learning.
Had alot of great things happen since then, got invited to a tech school that is actually near my middle school, though the classes are only for next year, i don't know, have not been there yet, and im not planning on going anytime soon, spring break is here
lol.
Well anyway, hopefully you had a 'fun' time reading my 'little' post lol, sorry if i bored you, but you asked me to introduce my self so i gave it my best.
But i have noticed something strange.
Since the doctor put that gold thing in my chest it seems as if i can not get off of the computer, but before they put that thing in me, i didn't even care about them. there is definitelly something strange going on here.
Also another thing, when i code, i do not think and i usually come out with something good, but when i do think and code at the same time, i get no ideas and i accomplish nothing what's so ever. Strange huh?

BTW - im taking these classes in collge. Tell me what you think, what i'am trying to accomplish is to develop for MS, and i think these classes will help out, hopefully.
English,
technical writing,
math,
algebra,
trigonometry,
calculus,
chemistry,
physics,
psychology,
economics,
general business,
keyboarding,
computer applications,
and computer programming.

I'm William Luu, and I'm an Australian Born Chinese. I just recently graduated (November last year) from my course (Bachelor of Computing) at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. (I think they were one of the first universities around here to teach .NET.
I think they may have started in 2001 or 2002)

Currently in my first job doing development work in ASP.NET (C#) and my official job title is "Project Developer". Whatever the heck that means

I've been "developing" with .NET since early 2002 (it was part of my course, well one of the electives I took anyway. Took about 4 .NET subjects at uni I think).

I'm a bit of a newbie on this site, I followed some Aussie bloggers (such as
Frank Arrigo) over to here a few days ago.

Anyway, it's getting late, I should be asleep. Actually, wait, what am I saying, tommorow is Easter Monday and is a public holiday!

My name is Paul Campbell, and I've been using computers since I was in 4th grade. I didn't really get interested in the inner workings until 8th grade. Since then, I've been poking, prodding, and breaking computers. I suppose it's only natural that I'm now
a Software Development Engineer in Test at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. It's a pretty sweet gig. I write code to break shipping software. The best part is that I don't have to fix anything, just break it in a documentable fashion.

I guess I'll take the time to write something here. Who knows, maybe I'll get around to moving it to my BIO here someday...

My first job was as an intern in a graphics art department using a MAC. At the time I was going to school at Penn State. I knew I wanted to work in the Internet (I had been working with HTML with some folks in the New Media Department at PSU and was in the
first class dedicated to the now existent New Media major there) so I jumped on this opportunity with one of the country's largest Internet Presence Providers.

After 2 weeks I was offered full time and accepted. Only problem was I hadn't finished school, so the next semester I commuted from Vienna, VA twice a week to PSU for classes (yes, a 3.5 hour trip each way.) That started to really suck, so I quit to finish
up a couple classes over the summer.

One of the Channel 9 guys hired me to work for him in San Francisco at that point. I hated the east coast and wanted to jump to the next level and pursued this even though I was STILL not done in college. I moved and finally got my degree via several independent
learning and continuing education classes. I walked into my apartment one day to find my diplomas just lying on the floor (my landlord put them there for me so they wouldn't get stolen from the mailroom.) Nice graduation huh??

After doing graphics, HTML, and simple PERL CGIs in NOVA, I did some more of the same in SF before moving over to the world of network/system administrator. I worked with Cisco routers and Solaris hosting boxes all day every day.

The cost of living in SF caught up with me and I moved to Redmond to contract at MS. I worked for a couple months and moved over to work for a MS vendor. In that time I did a lot of ASP work. Our company was bought by one of the local contract shops and
everything changed so I left.

I then went to a wireless messaging system company and programmed in JSP for two years before being laid off in late 2002. I have not regained full time employment since.

Currently, I am a stay at home dad for our 1.5 year old daughter, and run a rapidly growing freelance business during the night hours.

I do everything from PHP to ASP to ASP.Net and on and on and on...

Whew. That's the quickie business side of things...

I have a lovely wife, a gorgeous daughter, and two cats. We live in Seattle a couple blocks from the Space Needle and Key Arena. It's a great walking area of town.

Grew up on a diet of Basic on Amstrad, then QBasic on PCs, moving on to Pascal/Delphi and then forked towards web programming and C/C++ at the same time. Managed to keep both interests alive as I worked part time on a MS powered large B2B website and did a
degree in Advanced Computing when not working.

Decided business programming was not for me, so split off to Scotland to do a degree in Computer Games Technology. Graduating this summer, so shopping around for jobs right now.

When not working, I go for a run or keep in touch with friends (often via
my blog) accrued when moving about to different places in the western world.

Well, I'm jumping on this thread a little late, but hey - better late than never right? (sure...)

My name is Greg Miley (www.gregmiley.com). I dropped out of college to work full time years back (which I am now returning to college to finish up some degrees). I currently hold a position in county government in Florida
where I write and maintain software.

I got my start in computers back when I was around 8 (or possibly younger) when I got my first IBM 386 desktop. Ever since then I was fanatical with any electronic device I could manipulate to do my bidding. From C64 and Atari to IBM and Mac, I fiddled with
them until my fingers hurt.

Today I am 25 and still never find a dull moment in the PC realm (unless I have to perform senseless acts of data entry; sometimes unavoidable).

I have no real bias toward any one platform, Win32/*nix/MacOS they all have their strong points. Currently, however, I am fascinated with the .Net framework and have been writing small apps here and there for friends or just for my own self gratification.

The only website I occasionally maintain at this time is my personal one (as noted above)
www.gregmiley.com. It often undergoes drastic change in design as browsers change the way they handle elements as such, don't expect anything you see there to be a constant. Most of you should know that websites are a
constant work-in-progress and at no time complete.

It should be obvious that I am running out of things to type; I am still downing my first two cups of coffee on a monday morning. =)

Patrick Santry: I've been in Web development for over 8 years starting with Perl on Linux boxes ( you know back when someone mentioned IE, and you thought they were screaming in pain or something ).

Then as you all know that other browser kind of lost some of its popularity and IE started to mean something other than a scream. So I moved over to ASP code and working with MS technologies. I bascially jumped in when it first came out with Denali. I started
a couple websites up as well as worked as a Webmaster on my day job. My first tutorial site was Santry's Search, which I converted over to WWWCoder.com, which focuses on ASP.Net portal development, particulary DotNetNuke ( being one of the core DNN'ers, what
else would I focus on? ).

I also done some writing getting my start with that excellent development tool, FrontPage 98 (hunh?). I cowrote "FrontPage 98 MCSD Certification Study Guide", yes you could get an MCSD with a FrontPage cert!

I coauthored a couple other books, mostly on the server side of things: "Administering IIS 5.0", "Windows 2003 Server - The Complete Reference", and "i-Net+ Certification Study Guide", I also did some writing for MCP Magazine on certification.

Basically I work all day architecting applications, go home and work on my 10 node network, or my Website. My kids wonder who that guy is sitting in the office and all they see is my back ( no I see them once in a while ).

Name here is Ted. I'm a network engineer for an insurance company in Indiana. I'm currently a CNE working on my CCNA (just started).

I'm a 39 year old who actually KNOWS what usenet is and the dinasaurs like gopher, hypercard and <gasp> FTP! I'm jack of all trades and master of nothing. Seriously. I'm mostly self-taught with a few exceptions having learned bits of unix (before linux),
OS/2, DOS (yes, DOS) and I'm probably one of the few in the midwest who remembers the Radioshack TRS80 computers. yes, I still have an old copy of DOS 2.x somewhere in my house.

I'm quite interested in the road taken by Microsoft. I'm currently a beta tester for Virtual Server 2004 having to migrate a bunch of old form/print servers from 386's over to a modern server that has a better chance of survivability. I'm also embarking into
a new area for myself; disaster recovery.

I found this site via the intraVnews plugin for outlook after subscribing to Abner's stories.

Anyway, "old" guy here...midwesterner...I'm the old school "work to live not live to work" kind of guys with lots of hobbies...one of them being computers.

Hey, looks like the community is taking shape so I'll add some more noise

I have evolved from a SGI/Sun/Linux/Java/Python background in academic computing and research to my present state as a Consultant and New Media Creator dealing in 100% .Net Solutions. Two years ago, I had never used a windows box. Now I have some proficiency
with ASP.NET, C# and DirectX.

I hope to release a new online gaming platform, using managed DirectX smart clients, in the near term.
* Click a hypertext link in a browser and a game client window pops up immediately.
* No installation deployment issues to worry about.
* Full access to client side richness of DirectX: 3D gfx, pixel processing, input and networking.
* A huge leap over the current offerings in online gaming, namely Java and Flash.

Hey all, the name is Knute Hestness. I work for a contracting company and I do .Net development. I got the itch to program when I first logged onto the internet.

I have experience in a bunch of different langs, but I prefer to code in C# these days. Most of the apps I do are web based, however lately I have been learning how much fun it can be to do console apps.

Before .Net, programming was ok, but now that .Net has come along I have saved tons of time and have been able to leverage a lot of the included controls.

I have made a nice living using MS technologies and I don't know if I would be a programmer today without being able to use them.

Im Alexander, im 33 years old from Oslo, Norway, I have a 2.5 year old son.
Im a software developer and at the moment running a small company developing a remote admin tools for windows servers called NT Services. (we got a quite cool review in the feb. 2004 issue of
Windows & .NET magazine)

These days im doing all my work in C# but i also do Java,VB and most things you can get a webbrowser to understand.

I started my first fiddling with computers when i got hold of a ZX81, started toying with the internet in 94, and got my first job doing web development on mac server and workstations using perl and html. - today i do most of my work in a wintel world, but
have promised myself to take some time to have a look at mono.

In my spare time i like beeing out on some mountain doing snowboarding in areas common sense tell you you shouldn't.. but, kids.. spare time?.. not much nowadays.

"The probability of something going wrong increases in proportion to the inconvenience it is likely to cause..."

My first computer was the family's TI99-4a, back in grade school. Well, it was really the family's, but you can guess who spent the majority of the time on it. I fiddled with BASIC, but never really got into hacking it. I was doomed.

The Osborne x86 clone was next-- a piece of trivia: Osborne was a CPM company which churned out four (4!) IBM-PC clones in its deaththrows, one of which my dad got. I think he's still it. That gave way to various DOS boxen in high school, where I was primarily
BBS'ing, word processing (oh, to hear the sound of a dotmatrix printer at 3am again...), and playing games. Sure, I had Borland C, and I grok'ed the core elements of programming, but it wasn't as fun as BBSing. I was doomed forever.

It wasn't until I got into college that I started really programming, and headlong. I knew that I wanted to work with computers as a profession, and coding seemed the way to go. At the time, there was that or data-entry, and that didn't seem like a good idea. I
got into UCB's EECS program as a freshman, and was engulfed in the cryptic world of DECs, greenscreens, and mainframes. Ah, for the wonders of Unix-- archie, ychat, emacs, and .twmrc files... I enjoyed the expirience enough to ditch DOS and get into Linux
at home. There was no escape-- I was doomed.

Also about half-way through college I saw a presentation by Be, Inc. It was amazing! You could play 4 videos, many audio streams, browse the web, and the machine still worked! The demonstrator pulled the plug out of the back of the machine, plugged it back
in, and it was working again in 2-3 seconds. This was on two PowerPC 603e-66s! Yowza! I bought a BeBox, and drooled all over the slick API. Clearly, I was headed for certain doom.

Before I got out of college, I got an internship at a little company called ViewStar. They stuck me in front of a Windows NT box... which I had never programmed before, at all! By the time I went full-time, they had merged with a Seattle company named DSI,
and became Mosaix. That got purchased by Lucent, which spun off Avaya, which got rid of me. Luckily for me, Avaya also got rid of the original Viewstar product, which was purchased by eiStream, which hired me. So I'm back where I started. And now I'm coding
.NET. Oh yea, and I'm pretty much doomed.

Living in the east bay (just east of San Francisco) all my life, there was the constant temptation to jump on the "internet startup" bandwagon, but a steady paycheck convinced me otherwise, thankfully. That steady paycheck allows me to do the sorts of things
that keep me sane. See, as I mentioned before, I'm a just computer user. Programming is LOTS of fun, but it's not what I am.

My general outlook on computers is that they are a tool-- they help me do the stuff that I want to do, at least on the good days. I look forward to the day when the PC is as easy to use as a TV, well, as long as I can still load up the hacker OS of my choice
with enough rope to shoot myself in the foot when I get the itch.

I spend my spare time wearing black clothing, vacationing with my wife, listening to unruly music, watching
movies, watching bad TV, watching good TV, pining for the fjords, making a terrible racket with obsolete
and archaic technology, and even recording two of the worst sounding CDs you could possibly imagine.

I'm Charles Torre, one of the Channel 9 Guys. I've been working at Microsoft since 1999, where I began my tenure as a contractor working on the Microsoft.com family of websites. Most of my time as a full time employee was spent in the Windows division helping
to develop Windows Update with a team of fantastic people. I also worked on the Help and Support Center in XP, developing things like a shared Internet connection detection library used throughout HSC and an automatic device driver feedback mechanism (client-server)
enabling users to share information with us detailing device drivers not supported out of the box in XP. SP1 contained several new drivers based on this data. So, thanks for electing to send us the info!

I've been in Platform Evangelism for over a year now and I love it. Being able to work on something like Channel 9 is a testament to both the degree of vision senior management possesses and the amount of passion Microsoft has for our customers. As always,
actions speak louder than words. Let's change the industry and the world together, my friends.

Outside of work, I spend a great deal of time thinking about what's all around us: space. I'm an amateur astrobiologist. Can't wait to see the data from the Cassini mission to Saturn and Titan. Titan is an incredibly interesting moon...

I am also very passionate about cybernetic systems and how we can incorporate truly homeostatic mechanisms into our future operating systems making them much more stable, reliable, and help pave the way for a real world HAL 9000. I can't wait to be able to
teach my computer how to act, how to think, how to grow (intellectually, of course. I want my computer to remain relatively small, physically).

I hope you find Channel 9 as useful as we imagined it would be and help us evolve it into a place that you want to keep coming.

I started out as a programmer with BASIC on the PCjr - the first computer my parents bought. My mother's a programmer - she entertained us at dinner with tales of people who didn't back up their data at work. This, along with piano lessons, prepared me fairly
well for my life, as I have never lost anything important to a computer problem and have never had to deal with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

I've mostly been on PCs all my life, except for while at CMU - when I was there they were focused entirely on andrew (their flavor of unix) and Macintoshes. That's the only time I've owned a mac, and it was at least partially because it was cheap to get internet
access in the dorm for a Mac, but you had to spend extra for a Token Ring card for a PC. Plus, there just weren't many useful PCs available free on campus, but Macs were plentiful.

Programming wise, I was doing Pascal and C at college. When I graduated I found myself thrown into Access and VB without any real training, but was able to quickly get up to speed. I followed along with VB and started to learn VB.NET at work until I was told
they would use C# - I then started learning C# until I was laid off.

I've studied Java on my own, a little, so C# actually is coming fairly well to me. I've been studying it since I was laid off and plan to take my first test towards a C# MCSD in a month. A lot of jobs show up for C# in Denver, but they all require experience.
I'm hoping certification will help me get my foot in the door somewhere, as VB jobs are scarce. I've also been doing a little studying of perl - at first in an attempt to get a job that required it, but now because I find it so interesting. I'm also getting
into game programming and DirectX, but slowly.

Other major interests are Lego (thus the logo) and rpgs, and have a slim adventure published for the Silver Age Sentinels rpg.

I have been working with .net for nearly 2 years. I mainly work with C# and ASP.Net . Though I do find myself playing with anything from C to Scheme or Lisp.

I hated how back when I was in highschool (graduated HS in 1999).. I saw a CNN special on computer scientists and the life they led.. being handed BMW sports cars as contract signing bonuses and gorgeous stock options. I took the leap.. hopped on the bandwagon,
and told myself that I would graduate as fast as I could to beat the crowd.

Guess 3 years in college wasn't fast enough .. So now here I am.. doing independant consulting work in a boring small midwestern town. Soon to be moving to the Twin Cities in search of my destiny.

all work and no play makes jake a dull boy
if only I could claim that but it seems as though my Xbox takes up the other 72 hours a week that im not sleeping or working.